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Sunday, July 15, 2012

The only thing we have to fear is...fear itself. -FDR

Happy Dog-Play-Days-of-Summer Everyone!

Hope you are all enjoying your summer - or winter for all our pals south of the equator! We have been having a blast taking our dogs to various beaches along the seemingly endless California coast.

On one of these trips while I was admiring our dogs' display of pure uninhibited joy, the thought occurred to me that they seem to be so much more evolved than most people simply because they live in the moment. And more specifically, they don't pollute their thoughts with doubt or insecurity. They never seem to indulge in irrational fears or wanting their world to be different than the way it is right now.

Then it occurred to me that many of the qualities that we would all love to develop - confidence, certainty, vivacity and living life fully, is actually not something that we have to develop at all. My dogs have these qualities naturally!! Rather, we simply need to IDENTIFY and REMOVE the FEARS that we all carry around in its various forms: doubt, insecurity, stress, worry, anxiety... I could go on and on (and for a complete list - go to http://thesaurus.com/browse/fear?s=t and you will see how important FEAR seems to be in the English Language!!) but if we're truly honest with ourselves, we'll find we carry around a lot of this heavy debilitating and ultimately USELESS emotion! And this also manifests itself in our attachments to how we want other people to perceive us: successful, likable, owns impressive car/house/fashion/things etc, smart, strong, beautiful... again, I could go on and on.

The real epiphany for me here is, if you can let go of your fear (Note: fear does NOT have a hold on you, you're the one holding onto fear!) you already have all of those great qualities you thought you had to develop! They're all simply part of our natural state of being before our lives are made smaller by limiting and fearful beliefs. We all have the power to let go of fear, and it starts with believing that you do!

I think this is what President Franklin D. Roosevelt meant when he said "The Only Thing We Have to Fear is, Fear itself." Maybe he had just come back from the dog beach.